Flickr and obsolete technologies

http://www.flickr.com/photos/49243167@N03/4530257305/in/photostream/

Hmmm, I wanted to use Blogger's upload tool to share this photo but it would not link properly, here at work. Almost certainly that is the fault of our using IE6, more than a problem with the link, Blogger or Flickr.
Anyhoo...
The link will show you a 1924 photo of a member of a signifiicant early Gosnells-area family, paddling a little tin canoe down the Canning River, with another paddler not far behind.
If you look through the photostream of Mr McNamara there are a couple of photo's that hint at the river being considered far more vital in those days than today.
This treatment of the river as a legitimate transport route, as opposed to simply a recreational facility, made me ponder the unheralded death of technologies as new methods and tools evolve. I'm sure  most of us have heard of archivists bemoaning the unlikelihood of CD's or DVD's surviving as a viable medium, especially in terms of finding playback tools in 75 years, much like the BBC's Domesday Book tragedy in 80's ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BBC_Domesday_Project).
But how rarely do we consider uses of technology being subsumed by recreation after initially being a vital tool?
Horse racing is now a pursuit of wealthy owners and (generally) poor punters but it developed as a recreation from a skill that was once an essential part of life.
Most of us read, and some of us write, for fun but initially these were both skills that were, to one degree or another, valued and envied as effective business tools.
Some of us upload photo's. Clever people sometimes modify or tweak these photos using software tools like Photoshop. I often envy people clever enough to know how to use Photoshop but, before computers, there were retouching experts who had a valuable skillset that allowed them to produce art like this:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/49243167@N03/4540585238/in/photostream/ from the same photostream. I can barely imagine the time, experience and expertise it must have taken to produce. Now technology can be bought that emulates these same skills, turning what used to be a (probably) income-producing trade or ability into a recreation, not unlike photography itself.
So, as technologies evolve it seems that some will die and others will become games and hobbies. I guess if we could see which would be which we could make a bucket of money:-)